Friday, November 23, 2007

Next time you're at the checkout stand and you hear the beep...

So apparently the dude part of the winning team posted this to his YouTube account, for all the world to see. He also included some behind-the-scenes secrets, such as:

As contestants, prior to the taping of your episode, they let you walk through the supermarket for 10 minutes, so you can get an idea of what things cost. That's one of the reasons you never saw people really looking closely at the prices of things while they were shopping. You had to have a game plan (and I did!)

The studio audience isn't nearly as big as they want you to believe. There are mirrors on both sides of the stage. With the exception of the contestants, the audience that is there are paid extras, which is why most of them are only slightly enthusiastic. They tape the inros of several episodes at once, so that once the game play begins, there is no audience. The rest of the game is done in an otherwise silent studio! So all of that extra clapping is added later. The store really was as big as a real grocery store (so to see it put together on a soundstage was pretty amazing). The food was expired, though. And some of them (like the meat) were, as you would expect, props.

The winners go home with a check in the amount of their sweep, but the 2nd and 3rd place contestants only got a sweatshirt! So it really was all or nothing, in terms of winning.

I am thisclose to starting a write-in campaign for some network to bring back The Sweep. I'll keep you posted.